


The Widow's Walk

by impudent_strumpet



Series: Lighting The Way [4]
Category: Plague Tale: Innocence (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bittersweet, Bonding, Brother-Sister Relationships, But I do know Beatrice loves her daughter, Canon Dialogue, Canon Era, Canon Lesbian Character, Canon Related, Class Differences, Class Issues, Classism, Dialogue Heavy, F/F, Family Feels, Family Issues, Family Loss, Female Bonding, Female Characters, For this fic at least, Forbidden Love, Gift Fic, Gift Work, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Husband-Wife Relationships, Husbands, I Don't Even Know, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I'm Bad At Tagging, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Torture, Inspired by Fanfiction, Introspection, Late Night Conversations, Late Night Writing, Lesbian Character, Little Brothers, Longer fic than usual for me, Loving Marriage, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mother-Daughter Relationship, On the Run, One Shot, POV Third Person Omniscient, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Past Torture, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Protective Older Brothers, Romance, Sad with a Happy Ending, Some of it here and there, Sort Of, Talking, Teen Romance, Widowed, Wish Fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 16:43:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19398220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impudent_strumpet/pseuds/impudent_strumpet
Summary: Just something I thought up after a long comments conversation with the writer of "Farewell," a lovely Plague Tale fanfiction here on Ao3. I was totally going to have Amicia in an arranged marriage at first with Mélie on the side ( ;) ), but I liked what Valjinic and I came up with better. So I'm giving Valjinic a shoutout here and on my DA for helping me to come up with this and for writing such a sweet fanfic! <3This takes place about two years post-canon, after the events of the ending of the game. This fic also serves as a tapestry of other assorted loose fic threads and headcanons I had come up with but not known what to do with.It wasn't until seeing this game played twice, and looking at and thinking over parts of it MANY MANY TIMES that I realized just how much hell Béatrice went through, even before being tortured by the Inquisition. Especially when, in Chapter 1, Amicia tries to tell her about what happened to Lion and she clearly gets the feels when saying "My dear, I really wish I had the time to listen to your adventures, but..." :(My sister also wanted some angsty Béatrice mourning her husband, so I've included that too.





	The Widow's Walk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Valjinic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valjinic/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Farewell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19214095) by [Valjinic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valjinic/pseuds/Valjinic). 



The de Rune family had left Aquitaine a couple of years ago, and taken shelter since then deep in the forest of a city not too close but not too far away, in a recently constructed summerhouse owned by a noble family still loyal to the de Runes and that had gracious allowed the fugitive family to take refuge in. It was on the upper floor of this household, halfway down the hall, that if a breeze at night blew through the curtains just right and let the moonlight filter through, one could faintly see the shadow of the widow of Lord Robert de Rune out on the balcony.  
  
Even after two years, Béatrice had been taken out of the Bastion, yet the Bastion could not seem to be taken out of her, nor could the keen knowledge of all she had lost. Panic, flashbacks, paranoia. Days of such oppressive melancholy that every move felt like too much. Nights upon nights without a moment's rest, as she was unable to sleep until she was exhausted beyond belief. And then, it seemed that the moment sleep found her, so would the most graphic of nightmares, of how they had bruised her, scarred her, racked her, flayed her...that felt so horribly and monstrously _real_ they brought it all back.  
  
It was not all bad, of course. Hawthorn could calm her racing heart, St. John's wort lightened the crushing melancholy. Her loving children took good care of her.  
  
_"No one's going to hurt me, Mummy."_  
  
_"Mother, it's alright. They're gone now."_  
  
The two of them were alive and safe; God had been good enough to answer that most desperately desired prayer of hers. Hugo was cured and the rats were no more. And they were all back together, which was more than she could have ever asked for. Most wonderful of all was that her dear daughter Amicia and sweet son Hugo were no longer strangers to each other, but two close and loving siblings just as a brother and sister should be. And they would all build a new life. For each other.  
  
Things had been tentative. Béatrice was no longer burdened with being Hugo's constant caregiver at the expense of the rest of her family. When, after five long years, she could finally hear of one of Amicia's adventures, this one having been with Hugo, she had almost cried from joy. She had grown closer to her firstborn again, and for the first time to her new stepson. She had not even known Laurentius had taken an apprentice.  
  
She imagined that, before the reunion, Hugo had probably been unable to sleep at night unless he was beside his cherished big sister and protectress. For a while even afterwards, he had continued to. In particular, Béatrice remembered waking up early one morning, getting herself out of bed, and peeking into the rooms of both of her children to check on them, as had become a habit to her...to find Hugo's bed empty.  
  
Her heart had slammed into her chest then, prompting her to dash to Amicia's room, throw open the door, and nearly yell "AMICIA, HAVE YOU SEEN HUGO?!" until she found him curled up beside his sister, sleeping as soundly as a little cherub. That was perhaps the first time she had smiled since she reunited with Hugo at the Bastion.  
  
But it was still so difficult sometimes.  
  
It was in these sleepless nights that Béatrice dwelt upon the balcony, with nothing around her but her own solitude, the peaceful silence, and the cool night air. Though her mind raced as always, she felt somehow safer here.  
  
Then, on one of these nights...  
  
"Can't sleep?"  
  
Béatrice almost jumped out of her skin, a soprano shriek catching in her throat just in time before it could wake the entire city's dead. She seemed much more easily startled since her time in the Bastion, too...  
  
It was Mélie, the redheaded thief girl who Amicia and Hugo had somehow bonded with in their time on their own. Béatrice had not known, and part of her did not want to know, all the details of back then. But shortly after their reunion, Mélie had to leave for an unspecified time, and now, after two years, she was back. It would be no problem, the lady of the house had thought. They had taken in Lucas; they could accommodate another. Even if she was a coarse, lowborn peasant, if the children absolutely insisted and the girl had nowhere else to go, the noblewoman could find it in herself to concede to it.  
  
Little did she expect this would be a romance between the peasant and her daughter, even when she had noticed Amicia's pendant to be missing, which Amicia assured her and Hugo was in a safe place with the one she loved, and an unfamiliar black ribbon tied around her wrist...the latter of which was now tied around the other girl's brow.  
  
But what was done was done, and Béatrice could not, in good conscience, kick the peasant girl out, even after the many times she found herself irritated by Mélie showing poor table manners or letting slip a dirty word in front of her seven-year-old without anything resembling restraint. She could, however, at least discourage certain activities between her and her daughter while they still lived under her roof.  
  
"What... What are you doing here?" she stammered.  
  
The younger girl raised a thin red eyebrow. "You're here almost every night, aren't you?"  
  
"Yes..." Béatrice replied.  
  
"So am I."  
  
"Why did I never hear you?"  
  
"Hard to be a thief without stealth."  
  
"I see," Béatrice replied, about to continue on her way. "If you will excuse me, then—"  
  
"Wait," Mélie called. "Could I talk to you for a minute?"  
  
Béatrice turned back around to her. "This way, then."

~

  
  
"Wow, it's nice out here." Mélie looked out at the velvet sky, a deep blue just shy of black, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as she felt the midnight breeze caress her face. "I've never seen anything like this."  
  
"It's a balcony. It reminds me of Aquitaine, in a way," Béatrice explained.  
  
Mélie paused for a moment. "Lady Béatrice...your husband is dead, isn't he? Amicia's and Hugo's father."  
  
"He is, God rest his soul," the widowed noblewoman said sadly.  
  
Robert had probably felt his wife's distance in what would be his last few years. There had only been increased tension between them when he finally confronted her about it.  
  
_"I cannot keep doing this, Béatrice."_  
  
_"What are you talking about?"_  
  
_"Neglecting Amicia like this. You know I would protect Hugo with my life, but there has been no immediate threat to him since his birth."_  
  
_"I know there is. Just waiting for the right moment...I can feel it."_  
  
_"Really? What about the loneliness that surrounds a girl who has not even seen her mother, father, or brother in years? Can you feel that? We have another child, you know. Yet you have not acknowledged that since she first flowered a few years ago, and that was only out of obligation."_  
  
_Béatrice's voice rose. "You think it is not obligation that has me looking after Hugo day and night? Do you think I enjoy this, that I would not rather be with Amicia than watch our five-year-old go through such pain every day?"  
  
"Béatrice, there are people in the next district who die within the week if they so much as cough. Do you really think you are going to find a cure for Hugo?"  
  
"I'm his mother! I have to try!"  
  
Robert was silent for a moment, then sighed. "You do that. But I have a duty to my daughter."_  
  
They loved each other, but nothing had quite been the same after that.  
  
In a way, this was how Amicia's innocence back then was preserved by her mother, who shouldered the burden of Hugo's illness entirely by herself, keeping the evidence of it away from the prying eyes of the Inquisition and the starry ones of his sister.  
  
"You come here when you can't sleep?" Mélie asked.  
  
"It makes me feel safer, somehow," Béatrice replied. "Where do you go when you cannot sleep?"  
  
"A thief has her secrets."  
  
"You are not a thief anymore. You live under our provision."  
  
Mélie shrugged. "Old habits die hard, I guess."  
  
"Is what keeps you awake each night amongst those secrets?" Béatrice inquired.  
  
The girl looked down. "I still mourn for my brother."  
  
"Oh." The hardness disappeared almost entirely from Béatrice's expression. "I'm sorry. ...Wait." She looked at Mélie. "Might he have been the one in the cell next to mine, at the Bastion? A boy with red hair, wearing a hood like your scarf."  
  
Mélie's blue eyes widened. "Yes," she breathed. "Yes, that was him."  
  
Béatrice smiled. "He looked just like you."  
  
Mélie must have known that, as, whenever someone resembling Church officialdom came by, she would raise her scarf over her face and lower her voice to a deep bass to complete the look, pretending to be a young man and Amicia's husband. Béatrice was pretty sure she had even at least once heard Mélie mutter, "I'm a man. Don't you dare question it."  
  
Lady de Rune had herself remarried, mostly just to ensure a means of survival for herself and the children. She was honestly not sure about marrying Amicia off. Both she and Robert knew, back then, it would have to happen soon, with Amicia already being fifteen years old. And now she was seventeen. She already had several suitors, comely young lady that she was. But, in these circumstances, the de Runes kept their circle small, for their own safety. Moreover, a man would want a wife that would truly be his, both of them settled on the land he could now legally own and govern. A suitor for Amicia would want her to leave the family she was born into and start one with him. The de Runes had to be on the move, for reasons that could not be told to just anyone. However, if Béatrice remarried, she could keep Amicia, Hugo, and Lucas with her, as her children from her previous marriage. They could all stay together.  
  
And Béatrice would not have to go to the trouble of carefully vetting each of Amicia's suitors. Had things gone differently, she knew with a sigh, this would and should have been Robert's duty. A father knew how boys were around that age. He truly knew who best to choose for his little girl. She smiled sadly to herself as she envisioned her noble husband staunchly prepared to defend his dear daughter against any man who dared even think for a moment of abusing her, neglecting her, or using her up and throwing her away like a common whore.  
  
"My last words to my brother were an argument with him," the grieving sister ground out the words, clenching the railing of the balcony in her hands. "Before Amicia needed him to help her light the braziers and Lucas needed me to help unlock a chest. Then..."  
  
_"'What if, what if,' What if you stopped living like an animal?"_  
  
Feeling a pang of sympathy, Béatrice remembered her own last words to Amicia back then.  
  
_"You do not need me, Amicia. You are—"_  
  
She had been going to assure Amicia of how strong and capable she knew her daughter to be, until...  
  
_"But I do need you! I need you!"_  
  
Of course she would have said that. Béatrice should have known. The poor girl had just lost her father and her beloved dog, the only ones in the family to have even acknowledged her existence for the past five years. Of course she at least thought she needed her mother. Béatrice could not seem to stop mentally berating herself for that, even when, as Lord Nicholas dismounted his horse, her repeating the instruction to Amicia to follow the river to Laurentius and shutting the gate in front of the children had been what saved them from the fearsome knight, when he had killed poor Lambert and taken their mother away for questioning.  
  
The knight who had done all of this, and later killed this poor girl's innocent brother.  
  
She was staring down at her clenched hands. "I kept feeling like there was something I should have done...but, like Amicia said, Arthur would have insisted I go back inside, or I would have gotten myself and maybe Lucas killed." She blinked a few times. "As much of a pain as brothers can be, they always end up saving you. I wish I could have saved him. But I didn't even know what was going on until it was too late."  
  
Those words were just so sad. They made Béatrice feel like crying.  
  
Especially since Béatrice was no stranger to personal failure herself, mainly after the Inquisition had taken a personal interest in her family.  
  
Back then, she had done everything to keep them away from her children. Effectively quarantined her son to his room with the shutters always closed, away from prying eyes as she kept vigil over him when not desperately searching for a cure, or at least a treatment, to his condition. Barred her daughter from the study where this research was done and the Roman ruins where the alchemical solutions were made, for Amicia's own protection. Emotionally supported and medicated her son the best she could through his episodes, felt the pain and guilt spread through her as she turned away another request for just some time with her daughter. Saw the blackened veins stretch across her poor little son's skin like grasping claws as she told him to just breathe, saw the pained and lonely expression of her sleeping daughter and her stilled hand in the family dog's fur as she spared just a few seconds away from her research to kiss the poor little girl goodnight, before she went back to cry herself to sleep. Heard Hugo's agonized cries as he had another migraine, as his blissfully unknowing sister laughed in delight playing outside with Lion, wishing with all of her heart that the siblings could both be out there together.  
  
Even despite all of that, despite years of her best efforts and managing to slip them both away undetected as the de Rune property was raided by the Inquisition, they still caught Hugo. Even after taking his blood and forcing him to pass the threshold, they still held onto him.  
  
That was then. This was now, she kept telling herself.  
  
Without thinking, she reached over to rest her hand on Mélie's and stroke the top of it with her thumb.  
  
"Lord Nicholas brought Amicia's brother back to her alive on the same night he killed mine," Mélie said bitterly. "For a while I just couldn't be reminded of that. It still hurts me..." She looked up at the sky. "But I couldn't leave Amicia for too long. I really do love her."  
  
Béatrice pointedly ignored that, removing her hand from Mélie's.  
  
"Perhaps you wouldn't understand, not having been my age for a while," the redhead quipped.  
  
"I'm only five-and-thirty," Béatrice said dryly.  
  
Besides that moment of sensitivity and what tolerance she showed Mélie out of the goodness of her heart, Béatrice had barred the surly, uncouth peasant girl from almost any kind of affection from her, these bars as iron as the ones of the cage that Vitalis had imprisoned her in back then. ...But...it had been this very girl who freed the noblewoman from that cage. She had been the one to pick the lock with such expertise that even Béatrice found impressive. She was the one to open the door and let its prisoner out to finally gather her beloved children into her arms, each of them the light of her life she had not seen for far too long.  
  
"That was why I came to save you," her liberator continued, smirking. "Hugo made a deal with me, that he would help me get revenge if I helped save his mummy."  
  
Béatrice let herself smile at that. She could, at least, appreciate Mélie's blunt honesty.  
  
"They really care about you," she noted. "It's like...as if they owed it to you."  
  
"I suppose they take it as their duty to me, while I am in this state," Béatrice replied. "My duty has always been to them. To protect them with everything I have. Even more than what was my duty to my husband."  
  
"I was never sure what that meant, when I heard noble types like you talk about it, but...I think that's part of how I feel for Amicia," Mélie said. "She's my princess."  
  
_So lowborn a nobleman's daughter is a princess to her,_ Béatrice thought. "I do not think it the safest choice for now to have Amicia married to anyone, even if she is of age," she explained. "Not that you two have any chance of a priest marrying you."  
  
Mélie laughed out loud. "I never said anything about marrying her!"  
  
Béatrice frowned at her. "I _do_ hope you are not planning on loving her and leaving her, as they call it."  
  
Mélie shook her head. "No, milady. Just loving her."  
  
Béatrice was done with the stalling. "Is this your way of asking for my permission?"  
  
"Not your permission, but...something like your blessing?" the redhead tried. "At least...your tolerance?"  
  
Under normal circumstances, Béatrice would not have stood for this.  
  
But these were hardly normal circumstances.  
  
And Amicia was seventeen now, a woman grown, whether her mother was ready for it or not.  
  
"...You have my begrudged resignation," Béatrice finally allowed, her fists clenched atop the handrail.  
  
"YES! You won't be sorry, milady!"  
  
"I think I already am," Béatrice muttered under her breath.  
  
"I knew there was a God still out there for me," Mélie sighed up to the sky dramatically.  
  
"Mélie," Béatrice said sternly. "You must be discreet about this. What you seek with Amicia would be looked on even less favorably by the Church than by myself. And we are all in enough trouble with them already. I spent five years taking every effort to protect Amicia. I will not have it all undone."  
  
Mélie nodded. "Understood, milady."  
  
"One more thing," Béatrice added. "Could you at least try not to use such vulgar language in front of my seven-year-old whenever you have some sort of accident?"  
  
Mélie snickered sheepishly. "Fine, fine."

**Author's Note:**

> Note about the title: I REALLY wanted to reference an actual widow's walk for this, which I first heard of when I saw a little exhibit on it in a Halloween setup in a park in Québec, when I took a trip there in 2015. Here's what was said about it:
> 
> "The widow's walk is a platform on the roof of a house, often found in coastal areas, from which it is possible to look out to sea and watch ships go by. But where did the name come from?  
> As one legend tells it, the wives of sailors used to pace these platforms, watching for the return of their husbands from sea. Occasionally, the ocean would claim a sailor's life, leaving his wife behind to mourn. According to this story, the widow would return often to scan the seas from the rooftop, hoping her love would miraculously return.  
> Another legend suggests an origin for widow's walks found in towns. Rich widows and respectable single women who possessed such a walkway on the roofs of their houses could use them to enjoy the night air, thus avoiding the poorly lit and disreputable big-city streets. The walks also sheltered them from the gaze of passers-by, who unfortunately tended to associate women out alone after sundown with the world's oldest profession.  
> These hypothetical origins aside, it should be noted that these walkways were often built around chimneys to facilitate access in an emergency. In the event of chimney fire, sand could be thrown into the chimney in the hope of preventing the fire from spreading to the rest of the house."
> 
> There is said, though, to be little to no evidence of widow's walks being used to watch for sailors. And although they were mostly parts of homes in coastal America in the 1800s, they were also a common feature of Italianate architecture during the Age of Sail, which started in the mid 16th century...a little over two centuries after this game takes place, so I couldn't include one. RIP. But I decided to include a reference anyways.
> 
> Another fun fact: Summerhouses for wealthy families, or at least the term "summerhouse," actually first came about in 1350, when this fic takes place.


End file.
